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The weather looks good and NASA have started fueling Discovery for the space shuttle launch late this afternoon, the external tank started receiving fuel at 7:38 a.m. EDT and it will take 500,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and hydrogen to fill it. NASA is currently reporting that all systems onboard Discovery are functioning normally and we are looking for the launch to go ahead as planned thanks to good weather.

The shuttle will be taking not only Japan’s precious $1m lab, but also something else that costs much less but is very precious. It’s a simple pump for the toilet, as you may have heard in the news earlier, the three occupants of the space station had to manually flush the toilet and this is a time-consuming job to keep doing several times a day with using extra water.

The toilet pump has come from Moscow just three days ago and officials hope it will solve the problem. The Japanese lab is really something special, it weighs 32,000 pounds and stretches 37 feet in length. This is the second part of the lab, the first reached the space station March 2007 and the third and final piece will fly up in 2009. This addition will be the biggest room by far and the lab has been named Kibo, this stands for “Hope” in Japanese.

I saw it...and talk about timing...I was leaving work, literally walking out into the parking lot to my car...and noticed out of the corner of my eye a smoke trail...glanced up and caught a second or two of the fiery tail of it before it disappeared into a large mass of clouds. Pretty cool stuff, even though I'd seen this dozens of times.

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." H.P. Lovecraft in Supernatural Horror in Literature

We watched it on a high def channel SR found. On our big flat screen, it was the best view I've ever had. Sadly have never seen it in Florida, although toured the launch site in Florida, but no launches at the time. I really enjoyed the visit to Cape Canaveral.